AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Joseph Marks

Joseph Marks covers government technology issues, social media, Gov 2.0 and global Internet freedom for Nextgov. He previously reported on federal litigation and legal policy for Law360 and on local, state and regional issues for two Midwestern newspapers. He also interned for Congressional Quarterly’s Homeland Security section and the Associated Press’s Jerusalem Bureau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in international affairs from Georgetown.

March 27, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Federal agencies can now post policies, memos and other documents to the social site News Genius where agency employees and citizens can collaboratively annotate them just as they would a news article or a hip hop song on News’ Genius’ parent site Rap Genius. Officials at the General Services Administration ...

March 21, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Electronic health records can give patients significantly more power over their own health care, but a paucity of safeguards in how those records are shared and managed can also make patients more vulnerable, according to Deborah Peel, a psychoanalyst and founder of the organization Patient Privacy Rights. Revisions in the ...

March 21, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Federal agencies that manage scientific collections such as space rocks, fossils and animal tissue samples have six months to write draft policies describing how those collections will be made more accessible to the public online, according to a White House memo. The memo from John Holdren, director of the White ...

March 20, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
The White House does not share information about visitors to its Web and mobile tools outside of the federal government, either for commercial or political purposes, according to the draft of an updated privacy policy published on Thursday. The White House may share some visitor information with other federal agencies ...

March 19, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
The Obama administration opened up a trove of climate change data on Wednesday as part of its larger drive to open up government data. The data housed at Data.gov/climate will be contributed by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Defense Department and other agencies, ...

March 13, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Update: The #GeeksGetCovered hashtag rebounded and then some to 538 mentions on Thursday. The White House’s #GeeksGetCovered social media campaign began losing steam the day after it launched, according to an analysis using the analytics tool Topsy. The hashtag, which was designed to urge technologists without employer-provided health insurance to ...

March 12, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Legislation approved by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday would require agency chief information officers to vouch to Congress for the security of any new government websites that gather citizens' personal information. Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich., introduced the legislation in December in the wake of reports that HealthCare.gov, the Obama ...

March 12, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
The Environmental Protection Agency office charged with taking civil and criminal actions against water and air polluters used to organize its enforcement targeting meetings and conference calls around spreadsheets and graphs. Those spreadsheets detailed places with large oil and gas production and other possible pollutants where EPA might want to ...

March 11, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
The rate of enrollment in Obamacare health insurance plans dipped again in February, with about 943,000 people signing up for plans through HealthCare.gov, state online marketplaces or through other means compared with about 1.1 million sign ups in January. To date, about 4.2 million people have signed up for Obamacare ...

March 11, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
The ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee expressed interest on Tuesday in a House-passed bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, including by mandating a single online portal for all government FOIA requests. Judiciary committee staff members are reviewing the bill that the House passed unanimously in February, ...